One type of portal is a web portal, which is typically web site that offers a broad array of resources and services typically targeted towards specific categories of users. Portals are rapidly gaining, popularity and widespread adoption because they provide end users with unified access to applications, content, and collaboration services. Portals help corporate information technology (IT) staff and other users by allowing them to integrate independently developed applications in a cost-effective manner. Portals also help site owners by allowing them to provide a consistent, branded experience to their users while retaining control over the individual user experience.
A portal is thus made up of individual portal web pages, or simply portal pages. In some types of portal frameworks, a web portal model may include a scheme for aggregating and integrating portlets into the portal pages of a web portal. A portlet is an application that underlies a window within a portal web page. Portlets are typically reusable web components that display relevant information to portal users. Examples for portlets are: email, weather, discussion forum, news, and so on. For a given set of portlets, a portal framework provides flexibility in terms of how the portlets can be used. A given portlet may be an independently developed web application. Thus, the creator of a portal can choose selected portlets from different vendors and organize and integrate them in a desired manner within one or more portal pages of the portal.
A disadvantage with the utilization of portlets to construct portal pages of a web portal is that common attributes among portlets and among portal pages typically have to be named the same, or explicitly corresponded as being identical via manual and laborious specification, for the portlets to interact with one another and with the portal pages. For example, one portlet may refer to an email address as email_address, whereas another portlet nay refer to an email address as an email_ID. These two portlets cannot automatically interact with one another via such an email address, insofar as the property names for this attribute are different between the two portlets. Given the capability of a portal to run portlets from different vendors, this disadvantage can be even more apparent. Rather, the creator of a web portal may have to manually wire the email_address property to the email_ID property for such interaction to occur. When there are large numbers of portals having large numbers of such attributes, a disadvantage is that this process can become laborious and time consuming.
As such, the full potential of portlets in constructing portal pages of web portals may not be realized. Portlets dealing with the same types of attributes, like email addresses, may not be able to interact with one another to provide the full synergism among the portlets that may otherwise be expected. Without a way to efficiently provide synergism between various portals the promise of this technology may never be fully achieved.